music ramblings of 2024

i want you to taste this and tell me ... i'm the only thing that keeps you breathing ...


metalcore took over my fucking brain (2024-03-07)

i would never say my music taste is broad, it's usually just emo and anything vaguely related. but for some reason i've been fixated on metalcore recently.

it started i wanna say in december?? i had a bit of an itch for "mallcore" emo and so i found a pretty good playlist for it, and it basically reminded me of a lot of bands i listened to like a year prior such as pierce the veil (i will never not have to look up the spelling of "pierce"), bring me the horizon, and bullet for my valentine (not exactly pure metalcore but we're getting there). i also listened to attack attack! for the first time and was hooked, especially as i'd listened to enter shikari back in august.

this led to me also getting a little obsessed with electronicore (with a brief sassy interlude around new years') and also nu metal for some reason?? and then when i listened to penknifelovelife (thanks to angeloaks on tumblr!! used to be pklovelife but she keeps getting banned) and bmth, i got hooked on more classic metalcore like poison the well, botch and converge.

to cut through the meat of it i now have 94 discographies i'm working through (not all metalcore, only about 20 are) and i'm done with 10 of them. started with pkll back on the 9th?? i'm currently on killswitch engage though i took a break to make and go through this month's playlist. on the one hand i'll likely finally get done with discographies i've wanted to do for over a year such as mewithoutyou, but on the other hand it's daunting. it also makes me more appreciative of the genuine links between "real" and "mall" emo, such as the band keepsake from florida. they were contemporaries with (if not slightly before) poison the well and were one of the first bands to do the kind of sound of the early 2000s, a good 4-5 years prior. "sasscore", "fashioncore" and all these other offshoots of hardcore and metalcore were genuine movements and "scene" didn't just develop out of a vacuum with no relation to "mall emo" or even "real emo". even if i would not go as far as to call them all one thing.

leading onto that, i do want to do something slightly weird and subject myself to some slight mental torture. i discussed with my friend the idea of forcing ourselves to listen to the absolute worst of scene music, such as brokenCYDE, millionaires, 3OH!3, bodtf, etc. we'll probably start with some better, easier ones like attack attack! (who i already know and i think are genuinely quite good) and metro station, and maybe stuff like cobra starship. but we'll make it a slog in the middle and end. might even finish with onision just to really hate ourselves. i don't know, it's a stupid concept (in a funny way) but i feel we'd not actually enjoy it.

anyways i can hear cleaners coming so i'll end here. listen to angry music it's good for you.